


The Red Hood

by SignusOrion



Category: Little Red Riding Hood (Fairy Tale), Little Red Riding Hood - All Media Types
Genre: Blood and Gore, Cannibalism, Canonical Character Death, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Fairy Tale Retellings, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-28 05:50:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21131696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SignusOrion/pseuds/SignusOrion
Summary: A sort of stitched-together compilation of some of the different versions of Little Red Riding Hood.There is always a girl traveling in the woods to her grandmother's house. There is always a basket she carries, a red hood she wears, and a trail that she strays off of.And there is always a wolf.





	The Red Hood

**Author's Note:**

> I did take some liberties with some of the tales, because in some versions, the wolf is a werewolf or an ogre and sometimes Little Red doesn't wear a red hood.  
The wolf eats people here, so a warning for descriptions of that and a warning for cannibalism as well.

There is always a girl traveling in the woods to her grandmother's house. There is always a basket she carries, a red hood she wears, and a trail that she strays off of.

And there is always a wolf.

Sometimes he happens upon her and the hunger is not so apparent immediately. He sees her first as a human, and he is startled, reeling back into the shadows of the trees until he sees that she is carrying a basket and not a gun.

Sometimes she is not frightened when she sees him. Her mother tells her to be wary of wolves, but she has never seen a wolf and has never known reason to fear them. Sometimes she greets him as prettily as she would a human, sweeping into a neat little curtsy and saying, "Hello Mr. Wolf. I'm off to visit my grandmother today."

Sometimes the hunger is slow to find him, and when he sees her, he does not think "Lunch" and when he hears of her grandmother, he does not think "Seconds." He notes it down for later instead, when he will be hungry. He thinks "How naive" but though it is not the first time that a creature has been kind and polite to him, it is the first time that a human has and something about the gesture moves him enough to reconsider eating her, but only for a moment.

Sometimes she is frightened when she sees him, properly armed with the knowledge that wolves are predators, and that this one hides pointed canines behind smiling lips. Still she greets him just as prettily, if not with a shiver in her voice.

He could eat her here, but it doesn't matter how hungry he is or isn't--he never does.

"Good day. Does your grandmother live far?"

She always answers, "Not far." And sometimes, "Just past the mill you see there. The first house in the village" or "Through the wood, the cottage under the large big oak trees."

And sometimes he does not need the directions. He knows the house already, and he's seen the old woman living alone there. He leaves scratches on her door, leaving her sleepless and paranoid at night. He was saving her for winter, but she might not have long left.

"What do you have in your basket?"

"Cakes and wine. My grandmother is ill and needs a good meal to recover."

The hunger is slow to find him, but it always does, in the end. He realizes today, he can have both the old woman and her granddaughter. And cakes and wine do not agree with a wolf's stomach, but he finds himself craving what's in the basket as well.

"There is a flower field here not far from the path." He points. Her eyes follow his gesture. "They would make a good gift for your grandmother."

Her smile is genuine when she thanks him, and the irony of it is heavy in his throat, like a laugh he has to hold back.

Sometimes she does not need his help to find the flower field. Sometimes there are two paths to her grandmother's house--a path of pins and a path of needles, or a path of thorns and a path of stones. He tells her "You take this one. I'll take that one" and she agrees because she thinks it will be fun to race a wolf.

It is a race she always loses. He gets there first. He knocks on the door. The old woman answers, mistaking him for her grandchild and he pounces on her and breaks her neck and bites down on her arm, the warm blood and marrow filling his mouth. Her bones are brittle, the taste of her so strong he wants to retch and there is hardly any meat for each mouthful, but he can't stop himself from devouring her and then all that is left of that terrified old woman is the blood splattered on her wooden floors. He crouches down and laps it up. Waste not, want not. The floor is spotless, afterwards.

Sometimes he has leftovers. Strips of her flesh, her blood, her insides, and sometimes a piece of her jaw. He replaces the latch with an intestine, bottles up the rest like preserves and places them in the old woman's cabinets.

Sometimes he skips the mess and swallows her whole like a snake. Skinny from illness, her sharp angles catch on his throat on her way down and he tears up from the pain but still he can't stop himself and then there's a bulge in his belly where she's managed to settle. And sometimes she is hardy enough to survive this ordeal, twisting and turning inside him as he slips on her nightgown and cap and climbs into her bed.

Before long, there's a knock on the door.

"Grandmother, it's Little Red. I've brought you cakes and wine."

"Come in," the wolf says in a voice thinly-disguised as the grandmother's. The girl pushes open the door and pokes her head through, peering at the bed with narrowed eyes. She is suspicious because the door is unlocked or the latch is unnaturally soft and her grandmother's voice sounds strange. Not so naive after all.

Grandmother is sick, she reminds herself, but in the back of her mind, there's a faint fear that something is wrong.

Sometimes she is hungry. Inwardly, he laughs as he points her to the jars in the cabinet. The meat is fresh. She comments on it but eats it anyway and he relishes the sight of it. It feels a little like eating her grandmother all over again. She'll never trust the words of a stranger again, he thinks. She'll never trust the words of a stranger again, he mourns.

A loudmouth cat outside scolds the girl, but she pays no mind to the yowling of a cat.

Sometimes, she isn't hungry at all and she draws closer to the bed, to the grandmother swathed and obscured by countless bedsheets. The closer she gets, the more she notices the wrongness in her grandmother's appearance. She is almost entranced by the differences.

"What big ears you have!"

"What big eyes you have!"

"What big hands you have!"

He has an excuse for each. The closer she gets, the more he salivates and the harder it is for him to disguise the roughness of his voice. Finally, when she is close enough to see the size of his mouth, he can not hold back any longer. He cries out, "The better to eat you with!" and tosses aside the bedsheets. She barely has a chance to scream before he's already scarfing her down, hood and all. Her bones are tougher to crack, more satisfying to bite through than her grandmother's, and her blood runs hot in his mouth, it almost burns. He leaves behind not a drop.

Sometimes she tricks him before he can eat her. Sometimes she puts up the face of propriety and lets him tie a string around her foot as she goes outside to relieve herself. She ties it to a tree and races all the way home, smarter from the encounter, but so much more weary of the world.

Sometimes he eats her whole, just like grandma. She is smaller, but rounder than her grandmother and she doesn't catch on her way down, but he sobs from the rush of pain and exhilaration. She doesn't go down easy and he wonders why. Why can't he help himself? His stomach is so full, so full. The grandma kicks. He can't possibly fit all of Little Red in there. He thinks for a moment he might die like this. But he doesn't. He swallows the rest of her down, and impossibly bloated, he falls asleep, an easy target for a nearby hunter who cuts Little Red and her grandmother out of his stomach. They fill the void with stones. He wakes up, startled at the sight of these humans. He doesn't see the hunter or his gun. It is their ghosts who have come back to haunt him and he catches the weary, wary look about the girl's eyes and he jumps up to run away before he can think about what he's done. The stones in his stomach throw him off-balance and tear up his insides. He stumbles out of the house and then falls down, dead.

But when he doesn't eat her whole, the huntsman never comes by. There's no one to cut out the prizes he's stowed away in his belly. He cleans the viscera slick on his claws, licks the red staining his fur and when he's all done, there's no trace left of the girl who greeted him so politely and all he feels is terribly sick. A human might say his crime was excess. You did not need to eat the girl and her grandmother, they might say. You did not need to take their lives.

But he is a wolf and human laws hold no sway over him. His gods are ones of hunt and cunning. His crime now is this feeling he has, caught heavy in the back of his throat like a build-up of bile. He's had too much to eat and he's tempted to throw it all up. A soup of stomach acids and bones and blood and hair. It would be a waste, such a waste that he'd lap it back up again and upset his stomach all over again.

Ah, the cakes and wine. He gets to his feet unsteadily and finds the basket, this time left on the stool. When he lifts the lid, what greets him is a sprig of flowers. Against the checkered tablecloth lining the basket, the vibrant purple of their blooms is a cheery sight.


End file.
